Molten Core is done! I feel like I can de-stress a little as I’ve gained the mount and the helm, and don’t plan to return to there at 100 anytime soon. It was great to do though. I plan to open up an Alt now so they can also have a Garrison, to both feed my main and have a different leveling experience through Warlords.

For MC I joined an in progress fight so only had to fight the last 4 bosses, and our group had a far harder time on the trash than the bosses. Strategy wise I think there were enough folk who knew what to kill in what order, that everyone else just followed along – so it was like very old school MC. I missed Sam yelling for decurse, and thought that Ragnaros in particular had been toned back in terms of difficulty to make the experience more LFR friendly. Nobody made the joke about looting the damn dogs, sadly.

Well after a terrible login lag issue for almost all last night I was able to get online and get most of the way to level 98, then this morning level up to 98. Root cause was not communicated, and there was a 4 hour lag between any updates on the issue from any Customer Service team. Not playing a game between 8pm – 10pm is extremely frustrating, and Blizzard needs to up the service and improve their communications to players. I was not trying to raid, but most Oceanic raids would have been totally wiped out last night. Eventually the @BlizzardANZ twitter account had the update and after a reboot the server returned to almost normal. I still found some parts of the UI slow, especially when in a Garrison.

I’m in the Spire now and enjoying that zone. The quests are more haphazard and I think there is more flexibility in what order quests are unlocked. I prefer this. My Death Knight was 93 on 25 Nov, and I’m 98 10 days later, so allowing for Christmas feasts and parties I’ll be 100 in about another week to 10 days.

Hopefully that is enough to then get to average ilevel 615 for the Molten Core revamped raid and get the special mount and helm. I have an heirloom weapon which will be 620-ish when I’m 100, and then it means grinding through Dungeons and hoping I get lucky with Follower quests.

I’m enjoying the game, Warlords so far is great. It will be interesting to see what the long tail game-play is like for a non-raider (aka LFR Raider).

I’m about 5% away from level 93 now, and still loving Shadowmoon Valley. As a zone it is well put together. The rares spawn often, they drop interesting and sometimes useful things, the monsters are squishy enough (especially if you overgear the zone), and the travel time between hubs and quest locations is enough to get you “into” the zone and exploring without being tedious. There are the odd special things found along the way, like the quest to kill animals for steaks, or the special events for the garrison.

It is also a little morbid to look at this zone and think about what we know of the alternative from our character’s own timeline. I can see parallels in the geography and that helps make the story’s impact stronger. I wish I was able to level faster, but not at the cost of missing the experience.

Observation – Local Australian severs have made a huge difference in the game to me in terms of latency. No longer to monsters infrequently “stagger-jump” or rever to a place slightly when they are fighting. I love it.

Observation – It appears that the massive login queues are (mostly) gone too.

After a day of chatting about WoW to the nefarious gamer who first recruited me to World of Warcraft; I’ve resubscribed. It took a day to break my will, which means one of my favourite sayings by Oscar Wilde applies totally, “I can resist everything except temptation”.

Last night I ran Karazhan’s first boss five times to try to get the mount, UP once, and solved the archaeology Horn which makes your character bigger. It was great.

Related old news says WoW subs have increased again too as players return for Warlords (MMO Champ 14 Oct). We’ve seen this increase occur once before with the pre-Mists subscribers. It isn’t news in itself, but I think we will see a slightly different result from the Mists pre-sub drop off. My hunch (based upon only my gut feel) is that this time the subs will take significantly longer to drop away. They will drop away, but I’d not be surprised to see them climb upward again before doing so, and certainly expect the initial downward drop to take longer than it did in MoP.

Why? Part of my hunch is that the simplification from the item changed and the squish will remove a gearing attitude, and thus make it easier to maintain multiple sets, and therefore grant flexibility. There is also the appeal of WoD as something new, which is also a return to something that was popular back in the day. The Burning Crusade really built the WoW player-base, and many of us look fondly on Draenor.

Lastly I think they know how to make reasonable content, and many players and companies know that this formula works well. Yes, it is grindy, and a themepark, and often unbalanced, and also affected by a vocal minority … but everything is, especially in computer games. If Blizzard deliver quality the players will play. So far it looks promising.